very nice harman kardon 450

gusten

Addicted Member
hi
going to buy a very nice looking hk 450 old receiver, but I can't seem to find
much info about it. probably from late -70's.
could it be wort 30$?
gusten
 
I'm really new to this but i got a nice 330c the H/k guys say is worth around that, but I don't know about the 450. Can never hurt to bargain with em a little though, offer em 10 bucks less, they may take it. if i'ts in nice shape and everything works go for it
 
The h/k 450 where build from 1978-1980, its a little 2x30W Receiver!
After that came the digital Receivers through Harman Kardon! And the old days
where gone!
 
450

My first vintage receiver was the HK 450. I liked it a lot. I ended up giving it to a friend a while back after I acquired an HK-A402. A little more power and it just has a slightly better sound to me. The 450 is no slouch though. I would buy one for $30.
 
It's an ok receiver, nothing spectacular, but it is an h/k...

The styling is either love or hate for most people.

Cheers,
joe
 
I like the fact that many Harman Kardons have dual power supplies (4 main capacitors) and sound better than average with that said they have been nothing but headaches to work on/restore. I purchased a 450hk with 2.5 volts DC on both outputs. changed most of the capacitors out to no avail and can not adjust the potentiometers to lower value. . I am still trying to troubleshoot that. Also terrible deign many are difficult/nearly impossible to change out many capacitors. Harman loves to put their capacitors in at an angle so it is harder to find the correct capacitor to remove. Also the tuning gear is backwards compared to most will turn opposite way of the tuning needle. Not a huge deal but bizarre. The tuning gear seems to want to nearly come off then the spring will hit the circuit board and stop Turing. I worked on a hk570i that I could not get the FM "Stereo" to function. Also had dc on outputs when the tone or infrasonic button was depressed. fixed that with replaced some bad capacitors on tone board. Also ran very hot even at idle and had to replace the biasing pots with higher resistance pots. The existing pots didn't have enough resistance to keep the bias at 39 milliivolts. All in all these units were not designed to be worked on appears they made them disposable. Not worth the time an effort working on most of these machines. I have purchased other models of HK with High DC out. 1/2 millivolt or so. They need to be adjusted and watched closely and most Run very hot.
 
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You probably should start a new thread if you want help with the 450. I’ve worked on a couple of HK’s, a 730 recently and found it laid out well and easy enough to get to circuits. The EQ/Tone bd has several short jumper wires that were a pain to deal with, but not that much. The bias adjustment pots were those open type and one was bad. 1k trimmer would go open at anything above 200ohms. Replaced with multiturn pots. Good luck with the 450.
 
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